One of the main problems with Windows Vista (and earlier versions) is that Windows consumes quite a lot of diskspace, with few means to trim down the installation. To make matters worse, Windows tends to accumulate a lot of megabytes and even gigabytes of space during its lifetime, leaving users at a loss as to how to reclaim this lost space. In a post on the Engineering 7 weblog, Microsoft program manager of the core OS deployment feature team (...) Michael Beck explains what Microsoft is doing in order to reduce the disk footprint of Windows 7.

Of course the installed image is larger than the compressed installation image; Surely any OSNews reader should recognize that implicitly without anyone having to jump in to share that startling "insight".

Anyway, IIRC, the installed OS is about 1.5GB. Not bad at all by 2008 standards. By comparison, I believe Vista requires about "a 20GB disk with at least 15GB available free space". About a 10 fold difference. Even with NTFS compression, you're never going to get that within a factor of 5 of Ubuntu's installation size. Even Windows advocates in this thread have admitted that you'd never squeeze it onto an 8GB SSD.